Written by Brett McKay

I got my monthly issue of the ABA Journal yesterday. There’s an interesting article how many top students from our country’s most prestigious law schools are turning down the lucrative offers of big time law firms and instead opting to work at small firms.

The people interviewed had a common reason: more autonomy and more interesting work. While you may make tons of money working at a big firm, you’ll probably be spending your time doing document reviews for senior attorneys for the next five years. Doesn’t sound very exciting. However, the opportunities to get into court and work with clients one on one are more available at smaller firms. The trade off, of course, is the cut in salary.

So, in the end, the decision comes down to what you value. If you don’t mind doing boring work for lots of money, then by all means go for the big firm job. However, if you want to be more involved in your work, take the pay cut and work for a smaller firm.

The work ranges from document processing and litigation support to patent applications, contract drafting and even brief writing—including a brief for a tax case that went before the U.S. Supreme Court.

That’s stuff legal interns would probably do. The article says firms in India plan on taking on more complex work as client confidence increases.

Written by The Frugal Law Student

American corporations have already outsourced most of our manufacturing jobs. Now, according to an article on cnn.com, pressure to outsource white collar jobs is increasing. This is scary. I’ve read that many hospitals are already outsourcing jobs like x-ray analysis and blood tests to companies in India. With the Internet, all a hospital has to do is e-mail the data, some workers on the other side of the world look at the data (for half the price of an American lab technician), and they send the report back so it’s ready the next day.

This could easily be done with legal research jobs. Because of Westlaw and Lexis, a big firm could easily assign memos to an outsourcing firm in India. The workers get online, pull the research, bust out a memo, and e-mail it back to the firm. All for less then half the price an American intern would be paid doing the same thing.

Written by The Frugal Law Student

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